A moment from the 2020 thriller "The Boy Behind the Door" speaks volumes
about today's Hollywood.

The story involves a kidnapped boy and his best buddy's plot to rescue him.
The kidnapper briefly leaves his lair, driving off in a car adorned with a
bumper sticker that reads, "Make America Great Again."

It's not enough that this monster kidnaps children. He's also a Mega MAGA
Republican.

Modern storytellers just can't help themselves, and that tendency may be
tripping up their Oscar aspirations.

Several new films suffer from similar moments, clunky asides that show the
screenwriters' obsession with their political enemies. It often goes back to
the real estate mogul-turned-Commander-in-Chief.

Their Trump derangement may come back to haunt them.

Writer/director James Gray's "Armageddon Time" is a deeply personal look back
at his childhood in New York City. The "Ad Astra" director attended a school
owned by the Trump family, and that connection plays a pivotal role in the
plot.

Banks Repeta plays a middle school student who befriends a black classmate in
their public school. Repeta's character switches to a private school, one run
by Donald Trump's father, Fred Trump (John Diehl). And, of course, the
school's "institutional racism" rears its ugly head. Two different Trumps
appear on screen, neither cameo being flattering.

The film also takes two out-of-left-field swipes at President Ronald Reagan,
moments that add nothing to the film save savagely partisan asides. Gray
didn't let his anti-GOP sentiments remain on screen. The auteur compared
Donald Trump to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels in the press:

I don't care that Donald Trump doesn't like it. That man is a vile,
destructive force in the country and in the world. And if he hates
it or if his acolytes hate it, if Ron DeSantis, Mr. F***ing-
Education-Destroying DeSantis wants to hate on my movie, that's fine
with me too.

Turns out they weren't the only ones eager to "hate on" "Armageddon Time."
Most movie goers stayed home rather than give Gray's vision a chance. The
film has earned a pathetic $1.8 million at the U.S. box office despite
gaining 1,000+ theaters in its second week of release.

Fellow Oscar hopeful "She Said" recalls the work of two New York Times
reporters who chased down every lead possible to expose serial predator
Harvey Weinstein. The film opens with the reporters (Zoe Kazan, Carey
Mulligan) digging into allegations against President Donald Trump prior to
the 2016 elections before segueing into their Weinstein assignment.

We also learn of people, presumably Trump fans, leaving vile messages to the
reporters in question.

Were those early scenes necessary? Perhaps. What's clearly clunky is how the
film leans, hard, into its Patriarchy bashing. It should be more than enough
to expose Weinstein, which let the world know many other predators deserved
to be outed, too.

"She Said" includes several awkward scenes showing wicked white male
characters behaving badly. One sequence, set in a bar, finds a man hitting on
Mulligan's character while she's having an in-depth conversation.

The sequence is meant to show toxic masculinity in action. Instead, it only
showcases how woke storytelling is often unnecessary at best.

The film also had a weak opening weekend from November 18 to November 20,
generating a paltry $2,877,000 in worldwide box office receipts.

One of the year's biggest flops let its third act become a de facto attack on
Trump. The star-studded "Amsterdam" (Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John
David Washington, Robert De Niro and more) decorate a tale set initially
after World War I. The incoherent saga winds up with De Niro's character, a
respected general, getting pressed to give a speech that might ignite a
fascistic movement in America to match the one gaining steam in Germany circa
1933.

It's very, very loosely based on real events, and the whiplash-inducing third
act doesn't mention Trump by name. Still, letting a notorious Trump hater
like De Niro play the general knowing Hollywood's faux obsession with "far-
right" fascism doesn't take a political scientist to suss out.

Even the liberal Esquire called out the obvious Trump comparison.

Clearly, [director] David O. Russell is another creative who saw
Trump become the President, lost his mind, and then gathered as many
celebrities as he could to defend one of the most agreeable stances
in the history of the world: that hate is bad and kindness is good...
It was just the closest thing in American history that David O.
Russell could find that mimicked the January 6 insurrection. "You
don't get here without things starting a long time ago," Bale's Dr.
Burt says.

"Amsterdam" earned a major theatrical rollout, generating an anemic $14.9
million stateside along with a sour 33% rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Reports
suggest the film will cost its studio nearly $100 million along with any
early Oscar buzz.

The upcoming "Empire of Light" from "Skyfall" director Sam Mendes offers a
loving ode to the theatrical experience. Mendes' film, set in England during
the 1980s, offers a sizable subplot about the era's racism. You'd think it
was 1950s America, or even earlier, based on the story in play.

Olivia Colman stars as a theater manager who falls for another employee, who
is black (Micheal Ward).

Naturally the film takes a bald, unfair swipe at Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher and alternately rages against sexism and racism. Both are worthy
subjects. Neither is treated with nuance or context, leading to an early,
dismal 45% "rotten" roundup at RottenTomatoes.com.

Did the overt political messaging of these films hurt their box office
fortunes? It's hard to say, although audiences can often sense woke
storytelling without actually seeing the films in question.

The clunky messaging clearly didn't curry favor with liberal film critics,
though. That, combined with their anemic box office tallies, spells trouble
for any Oscar aspirations.

--
Let's go Brandon!

Ubiquitous <weberm@polaris.net> wrote:

> It's not enough that this monster kidnaps children.
> He's also a Mega MAGA Republican.

So, the film is pretty much real to life, then? :-D
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-detention-child-migrants

But I do agree that often this type of very crude characterization
is an indication of writing that is lazy also in other ways.
--
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